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Tuesday, 18 November 2014

Rant: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystals, how the community has treated them

I was going to save this for when I actually reviewed the games but by that point, this ship would have sailed and sunk.

While I will say that I'm proud to be a Sonic fan, I've had my share of entertainment from the series, one of my biggest problems I have with the series is the fans and how they react to new games. When a new game comes out for the series, you either hear praise for it from the fans, or you get everyone saying "this is the end of Sonic games, the franchise is dead" and so on. That second one is the reaction to the two Sonic Boom games, and while I haven't played the games yet, from what I've seen of the games, the "critique" from the fandom is off by a mile.

First of all: Sonic Boom is a spin off, Sonic Team is probably hard at work making a new main series game. IF A SPIN OFF FAILS, IT DOESN'T MEAN THE FRANCHISE IS DEAD! If that was the case, Mario would have died years ago, Pokemon would have died years ago, Mega Man would have died years ago, Pac-Man would have died years ago and Sonic would have died LONG BEFORE NOW! Bad Spin off games exist for every franchise and most of them are lost to time because no one cares about them. Its fine if a Spin off game fails, its not the end of a franchise. The two games are cash in's for the cartoon, that's all and considering the quality of other games with similar limitations, its not that bad (not great when considering other games like Spider man 2, but not as bad as other games)

Second: There's a difference between unpolished and unplayable. The closest Sonic games to get to that point were Sonic 06 and Sonic and the Secret Rings. Now why do I say closest instead of actually unplayable? It's because unplayable means exactly what it sounds like. You can't play it, at all. If you can clear the entire game, it means that the game is playable by its definition. Sonic Boom (in particular Rise of Lyric) is just unpolished. There wasn't enough care and attention put into the game to make it perfect, this is shown by the pop in/ pop out of models, performance issues, delayed sound effects, model clipping, rubber banding AI because their walking animation doesn't kick in ect.

As for the gameplay itself. You seriously can't be telling me you STILL expected a Sonic style of gameplay after seeing the trailers. This is a extract from my post on Sonic Boom:

"As for Gameplay of the WiiU version, it looks fun. Simple, but fun. If
you've played a Crash Bandicoot game, then you'll recognize the play
styles of the characters. But seeing as the founders of Big Red Button,
the developers behind the games, came from Naughty Dog and worked on
the first three Crash Bandicoot games (on top of the fact that Crash was
based on Sonic) its no surprise."

While looking at the actual gameplay, its more akin to Ratchet and Clank, the point still stands. This wasn't going to be a new Sonic Generations, a new Sonic Adventure or even Sonic 3 & Knuckles. This style of gameplay was based on previous platformers the team had worked on and while I would have preferred them to try something closer to main series Sonic gameplay, this still works for what it's trying to do.

To close this, the franchise isn't dead. We're not at 06 levels of effort here people. Sonic Boom is a spin off, people hate it so this style of gameplay isn't going to be used again (I hope). Sonic Team are probably working on a new main series game at this moment and if that game fails badly (to the degree of 06), then you have a excuse to work on the tombstones for Sonic.

*Do note that these opinions are focused on Sonic games made by Sonic Team, not other developers like Dimps.